Ladies and gentlemen: the dregs of the SPAC boom

Equity

TechCrunch

Entrepreneurship, Business News, News, Business, Technology

4.2 • 372 Ratings

🗓️ 11 August 2023

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week Mary Ann and Alex got into a mix of growth stories, and some less-than-winsome on the startups that are not having the best 2023: How Lula went frugal and set itself up for a massive up-round in 2023: Mary Ann's recent reporting on Lula was perfect Equity material as it dealt with capital in motion, and a quickly-growing startup. Even more notably, Lula is in the insurtech space, part of the fintech world that has had an up-and-down few years. Weights & Biases raises $50M: Back in the day if a startup raised a big round, and then a smaller round afterwards, we would have worried a little. Today's venture market feels a little bit different. So, MLOps startup Weights & Biases has added $50 million more to its coffers, and we didn't fret too much on the round coming in light compared to its previous tranche. Summing our views, anything ML and AI is hot today, and Weights & Biases is well known. This round was not a shocker. BlueJeans folds: Remember when Verizon bought a Zoom competitor during the pandemic? It seems that customers didn't, either. Sendy shutters, Proterra reaches for bankruptcy help: While insurtech and MLOps are showing vigor, Kenyan logistics startup Sendy is over, and an EV startup that went public via a SPAC is trying to shake up its accounting so that it can keep going. Not the best news, frankly. And we closed with the latest from WeWork (not so good) and its erstwhile bestie, SoftBank, which is getting busier with its checkbook again. What a strange week and one that went by so quickly. More on Monday! Talk to you then! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews foundersand more! Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we
0:15.2	unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines. My name is Alex Wilhelm and
0:19.2	I'm joined as I am each and every Friday by my friend, it's Marianne Asaveto, a senior reporter on the Tech
0:24.1	Run side on the FinTech beat.
0:25.6	Marianne, hi.
0:26.6	Hey Alex, how's it going?
0:28.5	Is it miserably hot where you are, like it is here, where it's been over 100 degrees for like four weeks straight.
0:34.8	Normally I would engage in weather-based chat as a way to find a way to make fun of Texas
0:39.8	but in this case I'm going to put that aside because we had a very important conversation before the show.
0:44.6	Which was Mary Ann was introduced not only to death metal band logo fonts,
0:49.6	but also to death metal band names. And it turns out that if you are a respectable
0:54.4	person out in society the name infant annihilator does not ring well in your
0:59.2	mind so not at all Marian will not be at the next Texas Death Fest, which I would love to go to.
1:05.0	Actually, this is where I saw a fit for an autopsy for the first time.
1:08.0	All right.
1:09.0	These names, these names.
1:11.0	I know, I know.
1:12.0	But like, it's not always what you think
1:13.4	cattle decapitation for example is a band against animal cruelty so on the
1:18.0	show this week we are talking about Lula and how they are frugal and doing
1:21.9	well weights and biases a big round in the M. L. Ops space,
1:25.7	and then Blue Jeans is folding.
	...

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